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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    For me, the constant shifting in animation quality for the Gundams themselves was the most jarring point... they made the designs so complicated that they could only be properly animated when standing still, so there's a noticeable animation bump every time we see a static shot of a Gundam. Apart from the fact that he's an indecisive extreme doormat, habitual whiner, and dirty coward who gets a bunch of people killed because he doesn't want to accept that he can't just go back to his life like nothing happened after being arrested on suspicion of being a Katharon operative, sent to a forced labor camp, rescued by Celestial Being during a massacre at said camp, and then sheltered by Katharon on Earth? If he could dial the self-righteousness up a bit I'd be calling him Man-Relina. I know in season one he was supposed to be "This loser is you" to the audience, but in season two he graduated from that to being simply insufferable until near the end when his testicles finally dropped. (I suppose one of the ways Gundam 00 improved on the Gundam Wing basic plot was that its annoying pacifist princess spends basically the entire series being rather brutally shown that peace is something you have to WORK for, and that it's not as simple as telling everyone to join hands and sing Rainbow Connection. She's just sort of there, and she's useless... except as Setsuna's morality pet... which was a lot more believable than what happened to Relina.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Others have explained this, but there are a few points I want to clarify. Namely, that fully internalized weaponry offers improved aerodynamic performance and improved passive stealth performance... but, in the tradeoff, the aircraft sacrifices some of its operational payload versatility, capacity for ammunition or internal stores may be reduced, and some weapons may experience reduced field of fire or become unavailable or difficult to use in one or more modes. Whether this tradeoff is worth it or not is one of the persistent back-and-forths that, like whether to have one all-regime VF or several regime-optimized VF designs, seems to come and go between fighter generations. The VF-31's not actually a fully-internalized weapons type though... it has underwing pylons meant for carrying medium- or long-ranged ordnance, and some ordnance containers are set up in such a way that the gunpod has to be mounted separately. They just don't use the pylons because Xaos is deliberately sending its VF-31s into combat under-equipped in an attempt to minimize the potential for collateral damage and civilian injury. The 4th Generation's keystone VF designs, the VF-19, VF-22, and VF-171, prioritized internally-mounted missiles and bombs because, at the time the first designs in the generation were drafted, active stealth technology had not caught up to the latest advances in detection systems, making the airframe's passive stealthiness more important. With the VF-19's 2nd mass production type and the VF-171's Block II upgrade, the latest active stealth systems had caught up to the detection systems and passive stealth was no longer as important, making carrying more ordnance externally a more attractive option again. Not un-aerodynamic, but rather deliberately unstable... increasing the available angle of attack for maneuvering. It's that increase in maneuverability stemming from the deliberate sacrifice of stability that the FSW VFs are after, and which also proved to be the achilles heel of the VF-19, making it a barely-controllable mess due to the high g-forces it could impose on the pilot.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, I actually did like Gundam Wing when I first saw it back in the day. All the side-switching that went on did get a bit confusing the first few times though...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Well, if you enjoyed my slow descent into near-madness as a result of Gundam SEED and Gundam SEED Destiny, stay tuned for me coming completely unglued because next up in my and @BlackRose's queue on Crunchyroll is the high definition transfer of New Mobile Report Gundam Wing, followed by Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn RE:0096. Then, hopefully, I'll be moving on to something more enjoyable than unanesthetized oral surgery. That's an awful lot of effort for a series that was marginally less preferable to the Off button on the TV.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Apparently significantly so, since the VF-31's beam gunpod also seems to lack the "beam grenade" charged shot mode.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I've just finished the final episode of the Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny HD Remastered Edition, and I have to say that I'm glad it's over and - machine god willing - I will never clap eyes on it again. That sh*t was awful! It's a really, really bad sign when you watch a series and you can only sympathize with the villains because they're the only ones in the story who seem to realize what a bunch of pillocks the protagonists are. I know Gundam's favorite theme is "war is hell" and it strives to end on a high note of fostering peace but this was a mess. Just like in the Universal Century, and like Durandal told Kira to his face, they have solved NOTHING and they'll be at war again in a heartbeat. All they've done is kill the latest round of would-be despots who deposed and killed the previous generation of painfully native morons running the governments of the few major power blocs. Their endgame? Install the painfully naive moronic children of those painfully naive morons as new heads of state for those very same power blocs. That's what started this mess! Borderline autocratic rule by the most naive and incompetent is pretty much a surefire recepie to ensure that peace won't last very long. I mean come on... the only put Cagalli in charge of Orb in the first place because her dear old dad whose hypocrisy caused a holocaust was so beloved of the people before he died, and in short order her administration was a powerless joke and the nation was really being run by the Seirans. Who'd put her in charge of Orb AGAIN knowing that she hasn't learned her lesson yet? Kind of weird how the end that Gundam SEED's protagonists fought so bitterly to avoid - having genetically engineered supermen making all the decisions - was the good end in Destiny with genetically engineered superman Kira deciding what's best for all of humanity. Badly written, stuffed to the gills with flashbacks, and so full of hypocrisy that it's squirting out of every pore like a firehose, this show was absolute trash. I didn't think it was possible to find a Gundam character I'd dislike more than Relina Peacecraft or Saji Crossroad... boy was I wrong! Kira Yamato, Cagalli Yula Athha, and Lacus Cline have grabbed the top three spots on the List of Loathing. (If you've ever seen Red Dwarf and remember that one early episode where the ship recovered a pod and Rimmer thought it was an alien spacecraft for most of the episode, only to have the credits pause twice so he could shout "IT'S A GARBAGE POD! IT'S A SMEGGING GARBAGE POD!" at the end? That's pretty much how I reacted to the last two episodes of Gundam SEED Destiny.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    While I could answer all of these individually with a great deal of wasted verbiage, the honest answer is that all three have the same answer: "it varies significantly depending on the model, variant, warhead filler, and intended use of the micromissile in question". In practice, they're as flexible and modular as the larger missiles. That said, most micromissiles seem to average around 1-2m long, with most hovering between 20cm and 50cm in diameter. Very little information exists on yield for micromissiles. Range-wise, Macross Chronicle describes them as being predominently meant for use on targets within visual range. Old sources like the Sky Angels book put maximum ranges of 5-12km on most models that were meant for use on the VF-1. Presumably with time and improvements in engine technology, range and acceleration have both improved. Yield is a sticky question since some micromissiles, like the VF-19's, seem to be little more than medium-range missile designs with a smaller modular motor bolted on while others are much smaller. Most seem to be a fraction of the strength of the medium-range missiles, something presumably compensated for by quantity. Of course, if you stick a thermonuclear reaction or MDE warhead in there, all bets are off. The YF-30 Chronos's multipurpose ordnance container has 36 micromissile launch ports... that doesn't necessarily mean that it has just 36 missiles. Usually, you can count on a micromissile launcher port having somewhere between 3 and 6 missiles in the bay feeding it1, which conservatively speaking would suggest 108 micromissiles in a container that is essentially about the size that the YF-29's external launchers are, combined. The YF-29's twelve launchers hold an average of 8 missiles apiece. 1. e.g. the VF-1's FAST packs, YF-19's FAST packs, YF-21's internal launchers, the VF-31's internal launchers, etc.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Two episodes left to go in the Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny HD Remaster dumpster fire... and I'm honestly left wondering if the Cosmic Era has a lot lead paint in its buildings. Durandal has come out on top in the "which faction has the most blatantly evil leader" contest between the Atlantic Federation, Orb, and ZAFT. Djibril's dead, having had his entire body vaporized by a DRAGOON from the Legend Gundam. Yuna Roma Seiran's dead, having been beaten up by his own troops several times and then completely accidentally getting squashed like a bug by a GOUF his forces shot down. I'm guessing Star Wars has been forgotten in the Cosmic Era, because nobody seems to come down with any ill presentiments when he shows up to announce that he is large and in charge from a throne in a room that looks suspiciously like he and Sheev Palpatine hired the same architect. To complete the Death Star II comparison it's even got a GENESIS gamma ray laser cannon. I keep waiting for him to start using "forseen" every other sentence and calling Rey his "Young apprentice". When Patrick Zala build one of those damn things and tried to actually USE it on Earth that was the point where his own troops up and turned on him. How does Gilbert Durandal manage to authorize building ANOTHER ONE just a year or two later and nobody in ZAFT sees that as any kind of a red flag? Moreover, this one wasn't hidden by a mirage colloid, so how did nobody know that he'd been building it? Come to that, why didn't it send up any red flags when he had ZAFT seize control of the Requiem and asks them to repair the sodding thing so it can be used again. This series has enough "I was just following orders" idiots to keep Nuremberg busy for the better part of a century. (They still should've shot Orb first, then done the Atlantic Federation's moonbase.) Meer's dead. Whoop-de-doo... it's the biggest anticlimax of the series. A character we've barely seen and who is generally kind of annoying gets whacked and everybody's supposed to be really broken up about it, except she's batsh*t crazy and started to really believe she WAS Lacus Clyne before she died. Little drama queen did an incredibly phony looking pirouette after she was shot...
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Micro Dimension Eater, the term is given only katakana or spelled out in English in most Macross publications that mention it. The difference between a Dimension Eater weapon and a Micro Dimension Eater is purely a matter of scale. You could call it the difference between a Strategic weapon and a Tactical one. They're both essentially fold bombs that use the super heavy quanta produced by fold quartz to create a short-lived pseudo-black hole that crushes nearby matter and pulls it into fold space. That's what the YF-30 was armed with during the final battle with Havamal and the Fold Evil... a MDE beam gunpod that fired a particle beam made up of microsingularities.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    It is, and it isn't. The Virgin Road VF-1 Valkyrie was supposed to be a VF-1D specially repainted in Max's signature colors for the occasion, and is actually referred to as such in Macross Chronicle. However, an animation error put a VF-1A monitor turret on it. This is still very much a thing that can happen, since the VF-1's cockpit block and monitor turret are modular.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not the Master File prototype version cannon that was just a variant of the VF-1's coaxial laser... but yeah, the official charged particle beam cannon and Master File heavy quantum reaction beam cannon both probably had a bit more stopping power than the GU-11, though that didn't stop the VF-4 from having the option to carry the GU-11. (Disappointingly, Master File also ignored the other, official mounting for the forearm gun... a 30mm rotary cannon.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Just because Yoda could commune with him doesn't mean Yoda would. Being a spectacular troll is apparently a trait common to many Jedi masters, Luke included. Obi-Wan only seemed to show up when he bloody well felt like it in the original trilogy. For instance, Luke wasn't able to call Obi-Wan forth to explain his "Anakin Skywalker is dead" whopper during the flight from Cloud City in Empire Strikes Back. Kenobi only showed up to explain himself a full movie later in Return of the Jedi. One thing I remember from the few Star Wars novels I read was that, the more time passes since a Jedi's death, the harder it is for their force ghost to manifest itself. It might vary depending on how powerful the force user was in life or how in tune with the light side they were, but by the Thrawn Trilogy, Obi-Wan's ability to reach Luke faded until he could only communicate in dreams, and then not at all. Maybe since Anakin was a Johnny-Come-Lately to the light side, he wasn't able to haunt Luke for very long... or maybe the more a force ghost manifests the faster they "burn out"?
  13. Seto Kaiba
    One thing I'll say for the Cosmic Era as a whole... among villains, it's a World of Ham. Were it not for current events, I'd have been completely thrown out of the series by a critical failure to suspend disbelief that anyone could mistake Patrick Zala, Muruta Azrael, or Lord Djibril for a sane leader. (Then again, with that purple lipstick and terrible dress sense, maybe the OMNI troops were convinced that Djibril was actually Boy George on tour...) Durandal's putting up a pretty convincing facade of sanity so far, without descending into either the territory of the smug snake or the magnificent bastard. His villainous "oh crap" after seeing the real Lacus Clyne shut down his Lacus impersonator was the first sign of him not actually being in complete control of the situation. (That said, Meer seems to actually be behaving more rationally than Lacus in terms of the content of her speech. The only person in this whole Orb invasion more sensible than her seems to be that one Orb general who points out that ZAFT is still attacking after Yuna's statement that Djibril isn't there is because they know he's lying.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    If you think that's bad, you should see the VF-1 book's gallery of all the different versions of the AMM-1... long range versions, short-range versions, high-maneuverability versions, versions for special warheads, versions that your VF-1 only wears to fancy dress parties... The section in the VF-4 book about its equipment is pretty sparse outside of the coverage of the AMM-3, and for good reason... as most of the VF-4's equipment is shared with the VF-1.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Yes and No, in that order. The book describes the semi-conformal missiles as the AMM-3 Flechette1, an all-purpose2 medium-range3 missile design descended from the AMM-1 Arrow4 that was the VF-1 Valkyrie's multipurpose modular missile. It follows the actual physical models in that it says the fighter can take twelve of them, where some official coverage is inexplicably wooly on the actual number. Like pretty much every other source, Variable Fighter Master File: VF-4 Lightning III dodges the question of the bore on the VF-4's beam cannons... the closest it gets to giving an answer is the claim that the VF-X-4 and other prototypes were outfitted with a variant of the VF-1's laser guns there instead (the Mauler ROV-20K laser cannon). It takes a turn for the weird when the book's description turns to the production version though, as the production unit is described as having mounted an OTEC XX-1 heavy quantum reaction beam cannon5 there instead of the official spec charged particle beam cannon. Well, more like four variants of the same missile... IIRC in high explosive, incendiary, high-maneuver, and thermonuclear reaction flavors. No word on when seasonal variants armed with pumpkin spice or peppermint warheads will be available. 1. "Flechette" is its name, it is not a flechette warhead. It borders on a punny name, as the AMM-3 is slightly smaller than the AMM-1 Arrow, the French word "flechette" meaning "little arrow". 2. Air-to-air, air-to-surface, air-to-ground... really, more an "air-to-anything-that-looks-at-me-funny" missile at this point thanks to the integrated multiple guidance system and OTMat high explosive warhead. 3. The term "medium range" was used rather loosely for the AMM-1 Arrow, since it was so heavily modularized you'd swear they contracted it out to LEGO and could have an engagement range of anywhere from 50km to several hundred km depending on how it was equipped. 4. The standard all-purpose medium-range missile the VF-1 Valkyrie was depicted using in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series... the ones on the pylon triple-rack. 5. Described as derived from Zentradi overtechnology, and apparently meant to be a predecessor to the OTEC XX-2 heavy quantum reaction beam cannon mounted on the VF-22's monitor turret.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Just a moment ago I finished watching PHASE 42 of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny's HD Remaster, and there's something about this series that I've been struggling to ignore but has really just become inescapable as of the end of the episode. The real villain of Gundam SEED Destiny isn't Durandal. It's not even Djibril. It's Kira Yamato. Absolutely everything that Kira and the crew of the Archangel who are following his lead do makes the war between ZAFT and the Alliance a million times worse. With the same sanctimonious, holier-than-thou smugness exhibited by Orb's Athha family, he runs headlong into battles between ZAFT and the Alliance and attacks BOTH SIDES, inevitably resulting in more casualties than either side would've been able to achieve alone, prolonging the battle by preventing either side from gaining an advantage and forcing a retreat or surrender, and in so doing causing the war to drag out far longer than it otherwise would have. FFS, the very first thing that he does is start harassing ZAFT forces to support the Alliance, having apparently forgotten that the Alliance military is still a branch Blue Cosmos and had literally just launched an unprovoked nuclear attack on the PLANTs with genocidal intent. It really doesn't get much more villain-y than siding with the side whose policy is genocide because you're not certain the other side are saints. Then he kidnaps Orb's head of state from her own wedding. I mean, sure, it was an arranged marriage to a complete arse, but it literally directly resulted in a militant change of governing policy in the country. With Cagalli kidnapped by a hostile power, Kira'd enabled the Seiran-led takeover of the Orb government. He singlehandedly removed the one thing stopping LOGOS's supporters from taking over Orb and making Orb's forces a puppet of Blue Cosmos. Every single Orb soldier who died, died because of what Kira did. He keeps poking his oar in over and over again, until ZAFT literally catches Orb red-handed sheltering Djibril. ZAFT and literally every other country on Earth are baying for this guy's head on a pike, and when Orb refuses to hand over Djibril peacefully Kira intervenes on Orb's behalf when Orb is invaded for harboring a known terrorist guilty of mass murder and all kinds of other crimes against humanity. Thanks to Kira and the Archangel's intervention, Djibril is able to get away AGAIN, and it looks like he's made it all the way to a superweapon this time... so Kira's responsible for all the people Djibril'll kill with THAT. Honestly, I don't know why Djibril's so down on Coordinators... with enemies like Kira Yamato, who needs friends? Kira's the best damn thing that ever happened to Djibril's plan most of the time. Kira may be Gundam's ultimate villain in that he totally gets away with having caused the deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people and is regarded as a hero.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    For me, what sold me on Iron-Blooded Orphans was how different its setting is from the standard fare of Gundam's Universal Century and most of the standalone shows. Gundam, and particularly the Universal Century timeline, has a formula that it adheres to every bit as rigidly as Nintendo's Mario franchise1... which has become so pervasive that it sucks a lot of the fun out of it for me by making the shows incredibly predictable. So I was pretty pleased when the writers of Iron-Blooded Orphans threw most of the standard Gundam rulebook out the window. 1. Say it with me now! Grasslands, Desert, Forest, Jungle, Ice World, Fire World, Boss!
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, this really is my first time watching Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny. Also my first time watching any Mobile Suit Gundam SEED episode past the 12th. Every time I tried watching it back when the series was airing in the US, the bowdlerized broadcast edition was so offensively awful that it drove me away. I only started watching it now because the HD Remastered edition is on Crunchyroll. Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin was beautifully animated, though I confess I'm a bit disturbed by how much more of a following its more blatantly evil version of Char has. Even the localization team for the manga was absolutely gushing about how hot the more evil Char is. For my money, the best recent Gundam is still Iron-Blooded Orphans. A good Gundam series should feel like a suckerpunch to the gut when all is said and done, and Iron-Blooded Orphans stopped to put brass knuckles on first.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Since Cagalli's new MS is entirely done over in incredibly tacky high-gloss gold (which I assume is probably an anti-beam coating like Quattro's Hyakushiki from Zeta), I half expect the little inscription on the gem-like thing at the center of the v-fin antenna to say something like "CRUNK AIN'T DEAD".
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, Io and Daryl will never be quite as "Florida Man" as that one Zanscare officer in Mobile Suit Victory Gundam who declared "By reviving the bikes of the middle ages, and reviving the tradition of driving, I've now become unstoppable!"... but they're working on it. "Whoever wins... we lose." also works well. (Credit where credit is due, the marketing department behind Aliens vs Predator in 2004 was so on point they came up with a slogan with damn near infinite reuse value...) Speaking of a "Whoever wins... we lose" scenario, thanks to my company laptop making a noise not unlike a cage full of angry finches going through a roll press I've been stuck with little else to do for the last two days and have made great progress on Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny. The guy who cleans the monkey house at the zoo said it best: This sh*t is bananas. Shinn had a few absolutely badass moments, delivering an epic "What the hell, hero?" to Athrun, pimpslapping Kira so hard he turned the Freedom into a fetching piece of modern art on the seafloor, and then delivering ANOTHER epic "What the hell, hero?" to Athrun before proceeding to pimpslap HIM so hard he reduced Athrun's stolen GOUF to still more abstract art on the seafloor. Now he's come over all weepy again, and you can just tell it's the prelude to a Heel Realization once Durandal's big plan goes public. One thing I admit has me kind of vexed is how easily the Atlantic Federation military just rolls with absolutely any insane plan LOGOS comes up with. They seem to genuinely have less self-awareness than the actual goddamn Nazi party. "Hey, we built this big damn death-thingy that might as well be indestructible, it's armed with roughly enough firepower to level Western Europe with a cough, and it's piloted by a drug-addicted brainwashed crazy person we abducted as a child and experimented on... can we use this to go kill every last civilian in Germany with your help?" "Sure, why not? D'you want us to pack you a bag lunch and some mittens?". The whole fricking world is up in arms after Durandal calls them and every last member of LOGOS on it, and what do they do? They pull up a goddamn sofas in their operations center for Djibril and his ilk and serve them wine while they wait for ZAFT to start shelling their military's supreme headquarters for no reason other than that they're sheltering LOGOS members. They even stop to help Djibril get away while ZAFT is busy wrecking their sh*t. (I also get the feeling this show would be a lot shorter, and include a LOT less fratricide, if people would finish their sentences. Athrun nearly ends up in an octupus's garden in the sea because he couldn't be arsed to finish a loaded sentence about Durandal's sinister plan despite having about five minutes in which to do so.) Durandal's own painfully obvious telegraphed reveal of Djibril as the fake ultimate badguy to his real ultimate badguy is a bit silly too. Kind of reminds me of a line of Bender's from Futurama: "Citizens of Me! The cruelty of the old pharaoh is a thing of the past! Let a whole new wave of cruelty wash over this lazy land!". Nice of him to leave his old homework behind on that colony where anyone could find a bunch of thinly-veiled references to his sinister plan (and presumably a whole lot of angsty poetry). It's almost as lazy as the whole "Neo Roanoke is Mwu la Flaga" thing... Murrie Ramius was pretty much THE ONLY ONE who was surprised by that one. Episode 40's my next up, and it looks to be finishing a round of everyone getting their mid-series upgrades. Durandal just handed Shinn and Rey the keys to the Destiny and the Legend, Lacus forked over the Strike Freedom, and after having Kira borrow and wreck her Strike Rouge Cagalli seems to be getting something downright blingtastic.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle's wording in the case of the TV series ARMD-class suggests the change of design intent from a "space airbase" meant to operate in geostationary orbit and out at the Lagrange points to a mobile space aircraft carrier came while the design was still under development. Leaving out Master File and its ARMD-00, that suggests to me that the L5 Front Line Station was probably the proof-of-concept for the space station design concept and constructed before OTEC reimagined the concept as a space carrier. Adding in those extra details is where it got a bit wooly for me. From what I've gleaned, ARMD-00 Constitution was a prototype for the ARMD-class (TV ver.) and thus was probably (in Master File's version) gutted and turned into the L5 Front Line Station after it was done serving as a test platform for the VF-0-NF and VF-X-1. It's the Macross 7 PLUS episode "Spiritia Dreaming", a sort of after-episode omake that was sometimes a comedic short (e.g. Milia the President, Macross 7 Bridge) and sometimes a tiny backstory mini-feature (e.g. TOP GAMRIN, Spiritia Dreaming). The episode "Spiritia Dreaming" depicted the Special Research Unit dispatched to the 4th planet of the Varauta 3198XE system to investigate the Protoculture ruins there carrying out their landing op, discovering the Protodeviln, and subsequently spiritia-drained after its leaders, Ivano Gunther and Cpt. Otolmauer, were possessed by the Protodeviln Gepernich and Gigile respectively.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Principally from having read the Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt manga. The whole first arc is a wandering mess that tries desperately, and fails miserably, to make the rivalry between Io and Daryl into something halfway interesting... in no small part because Io and the Moore Brotherhood spend a fair chunk of it literally wandering aimlessly hoping to track down a sniper by enticing him to take potshots at them. It's actually kinda funny in hindsight when you realize essentially it's the story of two grown men trying to murder each other in a disagreement over whose incredibly pretentious music that they'll listen to on the radio, the kind of plot that in the real world normally starts in the news with the words "Florida man". The whole schtick with the Moore Brotherhood and their quest for nonspecific space revenge on the Principality of Zeon for destroying their home colony is literally aimless (they don't have a focus for their revenge plot) and is so completely irrelevant to the story (besides justifying why the Federation side engages in so much pants-on-head stupidity) that other than providing some terribly stilted "drama" from a largely unimportant supporting character it's so lame even their side's own main character can't be arsed to care. Thunderbolt's second story arc, about the religious cult trying to recreate the Psycho Zaku, is so nonsensical that its runs-on-nonsense factor is actually lampshaded right in the manga with a character pointing out that nepotism is basically thing only thing keeping Io's story going. Otherwise he would've been punted out of the EFF and never so much as allowed to look at a Gundam after screwing up and allowing Zeon to capture one in the first arc. It's a fine example of an idiot plot. Thunderbolt's a darker-than-average Universal Century story, but the reason it's a wannabe-edgy tryhard waste of time is that it's taking the same "slaughter spectacle" route to being dark and gritty that Attack on Titan did. Because absolutely everybody in the story is an amoral psychopath there's none of the Universal Century's trademark humanity in the Thunderbolt series. Nobody in the Moore Brotherhood or the Living Dead Division seems to have any real misgivings about the war or the human cost of so much killing. It really feels like Ohtagaki-san didn't really understand why the Universal Century is dark... the reflection on the horrid cost that killing inflicts upon the human soul, and the sheer senselessness of hurting each other when you fail to communicate. There's nothing about the human condition in Thunderbolt, its pretensions to gritty darkness involve nothing more than jacking up the body count to the max and making each death or near-death as gruesome and bloody as possible. Iron-Blooded Orphans is a different animal entirely... it wholly embraces the darkness that Thunderbolt is merely a pretender to. Yes, Mikazuki Augus is a complete monster just like the principals of Thunderbolt, but it works in his case because he's the ONLY ONE. It became meaningless in Thunderbolt because, if everybody is a bastard then nobody is, thus it ceases to have meaning. Iron-Blooded Orphans takes a sincere look at the toll severe inequality exacts on humanity. Many of the characters are horrible people because they live in a world that forces them to be either the exploiters or the exploited, with the protagonists being a group that seeks a fairer world. Tekkadan is full of broken people, and the damage a life of poverty and the low regard for human life has inflicted on them is thrown into sharp relief by their own desire to make a better life for themselves and, later, all Martians. They're not fighting for the sake of fighting or the pleasure of killing, but to overturn a status quo that supports things like massive economic inequality, child labor, slavery, and mass murder in the name of maintaining order. Mikazuki Augus is a complete monster because he is the most broken of all, as someone who had to kill at a very young age just to not starve to death, and all the things he doesn't understand about living a normal life are used to throw into sharp relief how absolutely horrible life was thanks to Gjallarhorn's suppression of Mars. Put simply, Thunderbolt is merely a pretender to darkness because its darkness is purely for the sake of spectacle. Iron-Blooded Orphans is dark because its darkness serves to actually say something, and that something is horrible.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    What @SMS007 is getting at there is that one of the cofounders of General Galaxy - indeed, the man responsible for founding the Slayer Valkyrie Works that would one day be spun off by General Galaxy and develop the Sv-262 Draken III for Windermere IV's Kingdom of the Wind - was a design lead on the team that developed the Sv-51 for the Anti-Unification Alliance. Alexei Kurakin was his name, and once he defected back to the UN Government following the conclusion of the Unification Wars he landed on the Stonewell/Bellcom VF-X-4 project team and thus dodged planetary annihilation by being stationed on the moon for space testing.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    A quick point of order before I delve into this one... several of the designs you listed do actually have coaxial guns (lasers, beam machine guns) on the monitor turret. It may not be on all variants, but they do have them. The VF-14 Vampire animated in Macross 7 PLUS does have visible coaxial guns that, from the spec of the Fz-109F derived from it, are likely a pair of laser machine guns. The Az-130 has a pair of shoulder-mounted guns that fulfill essentially the same role. In all three cases, the chest-mounted guns fill the role of the rear-facing gun that monitor turret-mounted ones normally fill in fighter mode. The Sv-262Hs Draken III also has a pair of laser machine guns on the monitor turret, though the LM-27C railguns fill the monitor turret gun role in fighter mode for the Ba variant. The VF-9 Cutlass's transformation simply didn't make it possible to squeeze the beam machine guns onto the monitor turret, so the "Origami Valkyrie" ended up with them mounted out on the right shoulder. We don't know anything about the Sv-154's battroid mode, so it may or may not have something. As to why the Sv-51 was missing a coaxial gun when it was ostensibly developed using stolen development data from the VF-0 program... your guess is as good as mine. The role which the coaxial gun played in fighter mode was taken over by the hip-mounted miniguns. (It's possible the developers of the Sv-51 valued the extra armor-piercing power of the anti-ECA shells over the versatility of a laser.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Just on the off chance... d'you have any info on the connection between the Lagrange 5 front line station and the ARMD-class? Was the latter simply based on the former, or was the front line station the prototype for the ARMD-class? I'm catching up on a chunk of my translation backlog and was working on one of my favorite hobby horses... SVX-12's VF-0-NF Phoenix testbed unit for thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. I've got most of its details sussed out (it's a modified VF-0A outfitted with a pair of the FF-1999 engines used by the QF-3000 Ghost) but its markings include an affiliation for ARMD-00 Constitution, which isn't part of the first production lot of ARMD-class ships. I'm still digging, but I'm wondering if the idea to convert the space platform concept into a ship was tested on the L5 station first for the sake of expediency...
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